THE 



CRUELTIES OF WAR. 

V \ — , _ 



BY A CHURCHMAN, 
i 



PHILADELPHIA : 
PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. 
1864. 



(Tb 



THE 



CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



June 10, 1864. 

In a walk down Chestnut street, a few days ago, my attention 
^as attracted to a window in which were exhibited the photo- 
graphic representation of some horrible objects, the emaciated 
)odies of three of our soldiers, lately returned from a long con- 
finement in the Libby Prison, or the Camp at Belle Isle: and 
attached to these cards was a statement purporting to be that 
of Miss Dix, the same, I presume, already printed in an 
evening paper, describing the shocking condition of the sick 
and dying soldiers whom she had seen at Annapolis, immediately 
after their exchange. 

It pained me, I confess, to find that the excellent citizens 
whom I have known for nearly fifty years, and known as emi- 
nently charitable and christian men ; and that a lady, who, more 
than any other in our country, has devoted herself to the cause 
of suffering humanity, and whose untiring zeal and unpretending 
ability have enabled her to do more than all the Frys and 
Nightingales of other lands, should in any way lend themselves 
to the effort now making to intensify the passions of our people, 
and inspire hatred for our countrymen at the South with whom 
we are at war. 

I am willing to believe the statement of Miss Dix has been 
published without her authority, and that our worthy citizens 
referred to, like too many others among us, have never looked 
at the war and its incidents, except in the false light the direc- 
tors of public opinion daily throw upon it, or they would not 
have put such photographs in their windows, or inscribed them 
" Illustrations of Chivalry," 



4 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



I have since read a communication to the "Press," written by 
Dr. Ellerslie Wallace, of Philadelphia, describing the condition 
of several exchanged prisoners whom he saw and examined at 
Annapolis, dying or suffering from the effects of miserable and 
insufficient food, and wretched lodgings, while in the hands of 
our Southern enemies. 

I take for granted the perfect accuracy of Miss Dix's state- 
ment,* (although I think it was reported on hearsay,) and of Dr. 



* The following is a resume of the remarks of a friend to whom I 
read my MS. on this point : — 

Every military prison has its tales of horror — the English Prison- 
ships of the Revolution, in which our patriots pined and died; the 
jails of Republican France; and Dartmoor Prison, where our captured 
sailors of the war of 1812 were subjected to great hardships, might be 
cited. Even our Northern fortresses, crowded beyond their capacity, or 
our prison camps, in some of the bleakest situations, have given occasion 
of bitter complaints to the sick and miserable Southron, unaccus- 
tomed to the rigors of a Northern climate, and with no clothing but 
the rags he had brought from the battle-field, till scantily supplied by 
private beneficence — and all this often with little or no blame to the 
authorities. All praise may be given to General Schcepf, the com- 
mander at Fort Delaware, the results of whose humanity and gentle- 
ness is some accusation of others, under whom great, perhaps unneces- 
sary suffering has been endured. Even here, with all the kindness of 
the surgeons in attendance, and all the comforts provided by the 
benevolent, the deaths for a considerable time averaged fifteen a day ; 
and if the victims of scurvy, who were very numerous, had been 
photographed, they would give pictures more horrible and loathsome 
than those now circulated in our community as examples of the bar- 
barity of the South. If we had reports from Fort Lookout and Fort 
Johnson, the deaths from cold, exposure, want of clothing, etc., would 
startle our self-complacency; and the roll of Ship Island might, in 
another way, add largely to our list of horrors. Last winter, we heard 
of prisoners frozen to death in a rail-road car on their way from Louis- 
ville to a Northern prison. How many have perished from exposure, 
no one will ever know. They died unheeded^ and no report of them 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



5 



Wallace's letter, so far as founded on their own observations, 
and that they represent as truly as the sun, which cannot falsify, 
the aspect of wretchedness which excited their pity and horror. 
With these admissions, I venture to refuse the same authority to 
the reports of what they have not seen, and to doubt the correct- 
ness of their general inferences. I have a right to presume 
that the cases thus presented are the worst, and know that many 
others have returned from confinement in Southern prisons with 



will ever reach their desolate homes. So, alas, it must be in every 
war. We must, however, be on our guard against the stories of re- 
turned prisoners. The temptation to exaggerate both exploits and suf- 
ferings is great to the vulgar mind; and we should place much more 
reliance on the reports of such prisoners as Colonel Sanderson of the 
Federal army, who was in a position of trusted relationship between 
the rebel authorities and his imprisoned fellow-soldiers — and the 
excellent Bishop Johns of the Episcopal church. The former ex- 
pressly denies the charge of inhumanity or peculiar privation; and 
the latter, in his letter to the Federal Secretary of War, asserts that 
in his frequent visits to the Libby Prison, he " often appealed to the 
prisoners individually, and in groups, to know if they had any cause 
to complain of the treatment which they experienced, assuring them 
of (his) readiness to secure the redress of any real grievance. The 
uniform reply has been that they had no inhumanity to complain of, 
and that, except the privation of out-door exercise, they wanted nothing 
but to go home. The spacious rooms of the building, which was 
originally a tobacco warehouse, (he) always found sufficiently warmed 
and ventilated, and the appearance of the inmates that of persons in 
good health." (The Bishop does not speak of the hospital depart- 
ment.) Can any one doubt this testimony? And if we could, indi- 
vidual instances might be cited to confirm it. Might not the escape 
of Colonel Straight, and a large number of his comrades, prove that 
their strength was not impaired by insufficient food ? Such work in 
their excavations, such privations in their lurking and flight, show 
that their vigor was unimpaired by bad or insufficient food. 

We must first prove that the Union prisoners at Bichmond and 
elsewhere were worse provided than the Confederate soldiers, before 



6 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



health and strength unimpaired, and with few complaints of 
treatment. I cannot, however, doubt the suffering and priva- 
tions our soldiers have been subjected to, especially in sickness. 
They were inevitable. 

Mr. Davis, in his last annual message, says, a the prisoners 
held by us, in spite of humane care, are perishing from the in- 
evitable effects of imprisonment and the hopelessness of release 
from confinement. The spectacle of their suffering augments 



we can present any case against the rebel government. It is not 
necessary at this place, to prove the great scarcity throughout the 
South of all such food as our Northern appetites demand. With 
wheat flour at $150 per barrel, the use of white bread was abandoned 
by the rich; and a corn diet, often of the coarsest kind, was all that 
could be afforded even to the sick. To those unaccustomed to it, this 
is often particularly unpalatable, and some persons cannot be recon- 
ciled to it at all. When we sent it to the starving Irish, in 1847, it 
was often rejected by those who had nothing else to eat. Unless very 
well prepared, it is not at first readily digestible. It is dry and un- 
appetizing and has a tendency to produce diarrhoea. As to meat, 
thousands at the South, since the war began, rarely tasted it, and its 
quality was bad. There were no means of fattening, nor curing, nor 
transporting it. About the period when our prisoners were subjected 
to the greatest privations, the following was extracted from the Rich- 
mond Examiner : — 

"At an early hour, on Saturday morning, the meat supplies in the 
city markets gave out, and numerous families in consequence had to 
dine on Grahamite dinners. As long as beef is impressed for the 
benefit of 12,000 Yankee prisoners, this condition of the city markets 
may be expected to continue. " 

And in the same paper, I find that the Lynchburg Republican, 
learning that some three thousand Union prisoners are to be sent from 
Richmond to that city, strongly protests: "We don't want them here. 
We have got as many people among us now, as can possibly be sup- 
plied with food, and to have 3000 voracious Yankees added to the 
number, would make gaunt starvation, with its pallid cheek not only 
a possible, but a most probable contingency for all of us." About the 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



7 



our longing to relieve from similar trials our brave men who 
have spent so many weary months in a cruel and useless impri- 
sonment endured with heroic constancy." He expresses his in- 
ability to comprehend the policy or purpose of the government 
at Washington, in their persistent refusal to execute the terms 
of the cartel at first agreed upon, and by which almost immediate 
release was obtained on both sides. With a forbearance which 
might well be imitated elsewhere, with respect to the Southern 

same time, we heard of bread riots at Richmond and Mobile, and our 
papers seemed to exult at the news; not remembering our poor im- 
prisoned soldiers, who by tens of thousands must share the famine. 
The above extracts speak for themselves; at all events, as far as they 
go, they vindicate the rebel authorities from the charge of systematic 
cruelty. 

The improbability of the charge might strike all who reflect without 
an undue bias. Nothing could be gained by it — for exposure and re- 
taliation were consequences which they might certainly expect. That 
there were cases of suffering from harshness or neglect, we can hardly 
doubt. Some keepers, guilty of criminal negligence, we know were 
punished; all perhaps could not be discovered. 

But besides the above inevitable causes of disease and death, nos- 
talgia, a most common affection in armies, hospitals and prisons, pro- 
duces loss of appetite, followed of course by emaciation and inanition. 
Mere monotony of diet, with want of accustomed exercise, has some- 
times the same effect. The unhealthy and sensitive must sink and die 
in a protracted imprisonment. 

Without pretending to doubt the general aspect of misery pervad- 
ing the first importation of prisoners after the long cessation of ex- 
changes, or to deny the number of deaths in the transit, I would 
venture to ask, would it not be reasonable, would it not at least be 
charitable to suppose that those were first sent home who had longest suf- 
fered, and who most needed delicate food, suitable medicines and gentle 
nursing; those who were pining most for their homes, and in fact 
expecting to die, might beg to be sent back at once to their families, 
with the small chance of taking a last leave of those they loved ? 
Would not kind and Christian feelings dictate such a selection ? Such 
at least is the interpretation I venture to suggest. 



Colonel Jaq.ues, who visited Richmond in the month of July, 1864, gives 
the following account of Libby and Belle Isle Prisons, which he was per- 
mitted to visit : 

" I was very agreeably disappointed to find our men comfortably situ- 
ated, and as well caved for as was possible under the circumstances. Only 
the desperate cases of our wounded are retained in the hospitals of Rich- 
mond. Our brave boys were bearing up cheerfully under their sufferings, 
and were receiving all needful attention, and everything possible was being 
done for their recovery by the surgeons and attendants. This will be 
cheerful news for the many anxious mothers and wives throughout the 
North." 



8 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



authorities, he does not impute any base or inhuman motives. 
He does not hint what some at the North, even among our loyal 
officials, are said to have openly admitted, "that we can better 
spare our soldiers than the States in rebellion can," and there- 
fore (though our brave soldiers may be pining and starving in 
crowded prisons or under miserable tents at the South), we must 
not permit our feelings for them and their families to interfere, 
while their retention is weakening the rebel ranks more than 
they could in battle array. It is asserted by the Confederate 
authorities, that the difficulties in the way of exchanges have 
been of recent suggestion, and came from the side of the North. 
I cannot give the time to investigate the technical discussion 
between Colonel Ould and General Meredith, and have no means 
of testing the accuracy of their computations; but whether the 
system at first inaugurated worked more for the advantage of 
the South or not, it is very certain that the exchanges could 
have been continued at the option of our authorities on equal 
terms, man for man, (excepting only recaptured slaves,) and 
although the sufferings of the Northern soldiers were perfectly 
well known at Washington for many months, this was again and 
again refused, except when some special influence was brought 
to bear, and such a man as Fitz Hugh Lee exchanged for such 
another as Neal Dow. Of late humanity has made itself heard, 
and the barter of prisoners, which need never have been sus- 
pended, is now renewed. In the instances before us we have 
the horrid results of the delay. 

But, if our national authorities eschewed the usual modes of 
release sanctioned by the customs of modern warfare, their ex- 
pedition under General Kilpatrick had, with other objects, the 
same end in view. Whether the orders said to be found on 
Colonel Dahlgren are authentic or not,* (and they have never 



* The question of handwriting is not decisive. A copy, rather than 
the original, signed by himself, would have been with Colonel Dahl- 
gren, who, indeed, did not dictate the orders, and whose obedience we 
must believe reluctant. 



THE CRUELTIES OP WAR. 



9 



been publicly denied by Kilpatrick, or the authorities at Wash- 
ington, or by any officer cognizant of the facts,) the reports we 
have of the raid prove that the spirit which might have dictated 
them was present, and till the repulse before the entrenchments 
at Richmond, the plan laid down in them was fully carried out. 
A Republican correspondent tells us, that when the house of 
Mr. Seddon, the rebel secretary of war, was fired, he would 
certainly have been thrown into the flames, if found there. We 
may, perhaps, rejoice that complete success has not deprived us 
of all grounds to repel the reproach of such an atrocious plan; 
for, indeed, such seems to find advocates at the North. 

Nor is this spirit t>f recent growth. More than a year ago, a 
Senator of Pennsylvania claimed for himself the credit of ad- 
vocating long before, a policy of kindred atrocity. Mr. Lowry 
thus addressed the Senate:— 

"I believed then, and now, that He who watches over the 
sparrows, will chastise us until we be just towards ourselves, 
and towards four millions of God's poor downcast prisoners of 
war. I said that I would arm the negro — that I would place 
him in the front of the battle — that I would invite his rebel 
master, with his stolen arms, to shoot his stolen property at the 
rate of a thousand dollars a shot. I said further, that were I 
commander-in-chief, by virtue of the war power and in obedience 
to the customs of civilized nations, and in accordance with the 
laws of civilized nations, I would confiscate every rebel's pro- 
perty, whether upon two legs or four, and that I would give to 
the slave, who would bring me his master's disloyal scalp, one 
hundred and fifty acres of his master's plantation. Nor would 
I be at all exacting as to where the scalp was taken off, so that 
it was at some point between the bottom of the ears and the 
top of the loins. This, sir, was my language long before Fre- 
mont had issued his immortal proclamation. The logic of events 
is sanctifying these anointed truths, ' Father forgive thou those 
who deride and vilify me because I enunciate them, they know 
not what they do.' " 

This pious gentleman, who so reverently quotes the words of 



10 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



our Saviour, was afterwards requested to address the Union 
League of Philadelphia. His speech was reported, but only a 
part of it appeared in print. We are bound to believe his 
favorite plans were not acceptable to a majority of his hearers. 
His answer, however, to Judge Curtis' pamphlet on Executive 
Usurpations was printed and circulated by the Union League, 
and was thought by some of the members to be an admirable re- 
futation of that "disloyal" production. Some persons not of 
the League think differently. 

Other authorities might be quoted to prove how ready North- 
ern philanthropists seem to be to accept the doctrine of exter- 
mination. Long ago, our late Consul-General in Canada, the 
Hon. Mr. Giddings, in his place in Congress, threatened the 
Southern slaveholders with the arming of their negroes, the 
burning of their homes, and the pollution of their hearths ; and 
more than a year since, an applauded orator of the Union 
League, the Rev. Mr. Gilbert, referred to the massacre at St. 
Domingo, not as a measure to be advocated, but to be tolerated 
as any other consequence of war; and said he would rather see 
every woman and child at the South perish, than fail in crushing 
the Rebellion. And an appeal is made by such men to the laws 
of God and man ! Perhaps the library of Nana Sahib, or the 
King of Dahomey may supply the volumes. 

In the orders of General Sherman to his subordinates, dis- 
tributed before his raid into Mississippi, he admits that, accord- 
ing to the usage of Europe, in modern times, when war was 
waged by sovereigns, non-combatants were spared; armies were 
to be vanquished, fortresses, arsenals and public stores destroyed, 
soldiers captured, monarchs deposed; but towns and villages 
preserved, private property spared, and the inhabitants, engaged 
in the peaceful occupations of common life, invited to continue 
at their homes, and protected from all violence. But in the 
present war, as our real enemies were the people of the South, 
who had forfeited all rights by their rejection of the National 
authority, we were justified not only in depriving them of all 
power of hostile resistance, but of their very means of living — 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



n 



that their property of all kinds was our rightful spoil — their 
land forfeited and open to the occupation of better and more 
loyal men. Pie leaves a large and indeed unlimited discretion 
to his officers, in applying these principles.* And accordingly, 
in the boastful reports of their successes, we have not only the 
accounts of rail-roads, public buildings and public stores destroyed, 
but fields laid waste — mills, villages, farm-houses burnt, all live 
stock killed, which could not be carried off — furniture, imple- 
ments of agriculture and tools of trade broken to pieces. Every- 
thing which could feed man or cattle destroyed. And our news- 
paper writers exulted in the hope of thus starving the enemy 
into submission. So, too, in our accounts of Stoneman's raid; 
and still more in those organized in Georgia and Florida, under 
Montgomery! and Higginson, so honestly denounced in bis 
letter to Governor Andrew, by the lamented Colonel Shaw, 



* These are not the very words, but it is believed a faithful abridg- 
ment of General Sherman's orders. 

"|" An extract from a Southern paper, thus describes one of these 
expeditions : — 

"Colonel Montgomery, the hero of Pocotaligo, first brought into 
notoriety by the bordor atrocities of Kansas, led his black troops up 
the Coosaw River, in South Carolina, in several steamers, to proclaim 
liberty to the slaves. Landing his men without opposition, for there 
were none to oppose him, he proceeded to the nearest plantations, and 
made what he calls "a successful haul," of upwards of a thousand able 
bodied negroes for the recruitment of the Federal armies. In the 
course of this raid. Colonel Montgomery and his negroes burnt to the 
ground upwards of fifty private dwelling-houses belonging to the 
planters, many of them inhabited by women and children only. He 
loaded his steamers with piano- fortes, bedding, chairs, tables, books 
and looking-glasses, and any quantity of household furniture, and in 
the darkness of the night, only illuminated by the blazing ruins that 
his incendiary torches had left on every side, embarked his recruits 
and his plunder, thinking perhaps that he had done his little best 
towards the restoration of the Union. 



12 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



under Wilde in North Carolina;* and, finally, in the great expe- 
dition under Kilpatrick, concocted at Washington, without the 
concurrence of the gallant and Christian soldier who then com- 
manded the Army of the Potomac. Wherever these devastating 
hordes passed over the country, they swept every thing like a 
tornado, and years must elapse ere the traces of their route will 
be effaced. To illustrate the condition of the unfortunate in- 
habitants, I will cite two instances, by no means the worst that 
have been reported, but of exact authenticity. 

* The following letter is the best illustration of this expedition : — 

Headquarters, Forces on Blackwater, 

Franklin, Va., January 7, 1864. 

To General Wild, 

Commanding Colored Brigade, Norfolk, Va. : 

Sir : — Probably no expedition during the progress of this war has 
been attended with more utter disregard for the long established 
usages of civilization, or the dictates of humanity, than was your late 
raid into the county bordering the Albemarle. 

Your stay, though short, was marked by crimes and enormities. You 
burned houses over the heads of defenceless women and children, 
carried off private property of every description, arrested non-com- 
batants, and carried off ladies in irons, whom you confined with negro 
men. 

Your negro troops fired on Confederates after they had surrendered, 
and they were only saved by the exertions of the more humane of 
your white officers. 

Last, but not least, under the pretext that he was a guerrilla, you 
hanged David Bright, a private of Company L, 62d Georgia Regi- 
ment (Cavalry), forcing the ladies and gentlemen whom you held in 
arrest to witness the execution. Therefore, I have obtained an order 
from, the general commanding, for the execution of Samuel Jones, a 
private of Company B, 5th Ohio, whom I shall hang in retaliation. I 
hold two more of your men in irons, as hostages for Mrs. Weeks and 
Mrs. Mundin. When these ladies are released, these men will be 
released, and treated as prisoners of 'war. 

Col. Joel R. Griffin. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



13 



Among the friends of the admirable lady whose name was 
mentioned at the beginning of this pamphlet, was a young 
married woman living on her estate in Tennessee. Her servants 
had all been carried off, save a superannuated woman, and a 
one-armed man. When the United States troops approached 
her house, she was unprotected, with a younger brother ill of 
typhoid fever, and two little children. Her house was stripped 
of all that could be carried off, and not only all her meat and 
meal, but the esculents of her garden, and her standing crop 
destroyed. The family might all have perished, as they had 
few neighbours, and the country was desolated, had not General 
Rousseau been within reach of a message, who was an old 
acquaintance, and sent some army rations. This is no isolated 
case. Many a humble household has been left to starve — many 
a helpless family with no shelter but the woods. 

Again, in Virginia, during Kilpatrick's raid, among innumer- 
able stories of woe, one is told of a poor old carpenter, the sole 
support of several young grandchildren. His house was simi- 
larly sacked ; his and the childrens clothes taken, his little furni- 
ture and crockery destroyed, and then his tools of trade, his only 
resource broken to pieces. 

Such were the deeds of our soldiers, not only recently, but on 
the first months of our invasion of the Old Dominion by Geary 
and Blencker. The latter has given his name in the army to this 
species of wanton violence — an unenviable immortality. The former 
left unpunished the atrocious murder and mutilation, by a party 
of his men, of Colonel Scott, of Fauquier county, (the staunchest 
opponent of secession in his native State,) while defending the 
wife or sister of one of his neighbors from their brutal violence ; 
and the charge against General McDowell, at his court martial, 
of undue kindness and consideration towards the family of the 
murdered man, showed the animus of our National authorities 
from the first. 

I have wandered, because I could not separate kindred acts, 
a little from my topic — the^&atou&ia policy of our war office as 
affecting the Union prisoners at Richmond and elsewhere. If 



14 



THE CRUELTIES OP WAR. 



the sufferings visited on the unarmed population of our Southern 
country is repaid with some bitterness to our soldiers, (the in- 
struments of that policy,) who is to blame? If all the cattle 
and sheep were killed, what fresh meat could even wealth pro- 
cure? If every salt work, and private pan, within reach of our 
troops are destroyed, the bacon for army rations must be left 
uncured. Coarse corn bread has been the chief subsistence of 
the Southern army, with nothing to make it palatable but 
a chance supply, derived perhaps from the capture of a North- 
ern train. His insufficient clothing was the coarse product of 
Southern manufactures. His overcoats and blankets, if not af- 
forded from the commissary stores of his invader, substituted by 
rugs, coverlets or pieces of carpet, ungrudgingly given, though 
hardly spared from his Southern home. If sick, he had none 
of the ordinary comforts of a hospital, clean beds and sheets, 
and change of clothing; no tea, no coffee or sugar, or brandy, 
perhaps none of the medicines essential to his treatment. Such 
are the privations of the Southern soldier — such must the pri- 
soner in his hands share with him. Unused to such food, the 
delicately nurtured Northerner rejects it, and pines for the 
ordinary comforts of common life ; but charity cannot minister 
what wealth cannot command. The ragged, shoeless, filthy 
soldiers, brought to our Northern fortresses and hospitals, after 
the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, show with what clothes 
and food men may fight bravely "pro aris et focis."* 

All this is stated to prove, that if we carry on our war by 
means, such as Christianity and humanity, as understood in 
every land but our own condemn, our soldiers in the hands of 
the enemy must suffer the consequences. If they occasionally 
meet with acts of rudeness or cruelty, we may attribute it to a 
bitterness hardly to be wondered at. May be his rude guardian 



* I have seen a private letter, written in May last, in which it is incident- 
ally mentioned, that the daily rations of a brigade surgeon and his servant, 
in the rebel army, consisted of one quart of Indian meal and a quarter of 
a pound of bacon (for the two) ; and this at a time when the army was re- 
ported as well fed. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



15 



recollects his home pillaged and burnt— his aged parents or 
children turned into the woods for shelter — or perhaps even 
greater outrages than these. No proof has ever been given of 
any systematic harshness or neglect on the part of the Con- 
federate authorities. Instances of brutality have been punished, 
as in the case of Mrs. Lincoln's brother, Colonel Todd, who is 
said to have been very cruel to the prisoners under him. One 
of the soldier's, quoted by Dr. Wallace, said that his great-coat 
and blanket were taken from him by his captors. Perhaps they 
were seized as part of his accoutrement, by a soldier unprovided 
with either ; but that the wounded or sick in the hospitals were 
ever stripped of clothing or private property, has never been 
asserted, and the writer will venture to deny. "When some of 
the prisoners died in the hospitals at Charleston, their little 
valuables, and every thing which was thought would be prized 
as souvenirs by their Northern friends, were collected and sent 
by flag of truce ; an act of courtesy which I have not heard has 
been reciprocated, though I doubt not from the character of 
many of the benevolent ladies and others in attendance at the 
Northern hospitals, it has in many individual instances been 
done. All accounts we have of the treatment of the sick and 
wounded, on both sides of the dividing line, give a high tribute 
to the humanity of the medical profession, and many instances 
are mentioned by our exchanged soldiers of kindness from pri- 
vate individuals. But the surgeons are far less numerous at the 
South, all hospital supplies very scant, many of the medicines 
and ordinary comforts for the sick are wanting.* We must re- 
member that in the Southern States, the means of every one are 



* While transcribing the above pages, I was surprised and grieved 
to find in a morning paper, an article exhibiting a portion of the 
medical profession in a very different light. It seems that at the 
National Medical Convention, recently assembled in New York, "Dr. 
A. K. Gardner of that city, offered a series of resolutions to the effect, 
that the association use its influence to cause all medicines and medical 
and surgical instruments and appliances to be excluded from the list 



16 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



straightened, and all luxuries cut off, that every family is working 
for its own support, or to aid their brethren in the field. There 
is no surplus to lavish or curtail — no appeal can be made to 
benevolence, through the medium of pleasure or vanity. It is 
earnest work with them all in the defence of life and property, 
of family and household. What can we expect from the ruined 
and desolated South? 



of articles called " contraband of war." This resolution was offered 
chiefly in the interest of the soldiers of the North, who might chance 
to be wounded or sick in the hands of the enemy. How often has the 
wail of agony come from the prison-houses of the South, where our 
unfortunate countrymen have been suffering, dying for lack of these 
medicines and medical appliances, that their captors were unable to 
furnish from their slender store." In the language of Dr. Gardner's 
preamble : — 

" Thousands and tens of thousands of our brave sons and brothers, 
fighting for the holy cause of our glorious Union, and left wounded 
on the battle-field in the hands of the enemy, have been compelled to 
have operations performed without the relief and benefit which chloro- 
form would bring, and have lain in suffering unto death in the hos- 
pitals of the South, from the absolute destitution of the country of 
many needful medicines and instruments of surgery." 

"Yet the reading of these resolutions/' says the reporter, "was 
greeted with a storm of mingled hisses and applause. The doctor, 
astonished that his simple effort to alleviate suffering should meet with 
such disapprobation, was branded as a copperhead, and the whole 
matter was indefinitely laid upon the table. 

"It would thus appear that, in the opinion of some furious Southern 
haters, the object of the war is to inflict suffering and death upon in- 
dividual rebels, to which end they are willing to sacrifice their kindred 
and countrymen, lying mutilated or stricken with disease in Southern 
prisons. * * * It is not Christian warfare that denies medicine 
to the sick, although an enemy. In our opinion, any physician who 
could so far give way to sectional antipathies as to oppose such a reso- 
lution, is unfit for the responsibilities of his vocation." 

These are not my words. I leave it to those of the profession, 
whose Christian benevolence I know, and whose minds are not dis- 
ordered by the madness of the times, to say whether they are just. 



THE CRUELTIES OP WAR. 



17 



When our armies spare Southern families and homes, when 
a Yankee Bayard can be found to restore their plate and jewelry 
to his captives, instead of sending them for display at Northern 
banquets, or in Northern ball rooms, we shall have some right 
to talk of chivalry. When Northern generals can show regions 
they have visited at the South, as little ravaged as were the 
border counties of Pennsylvania last summer ; where private 
property was spared, even guarded; fences unburnt, growing 
crops uninjured, even protected by a line of guards from cavalry 
horses pastured in adjoining fields, we may claim for ourselves a: 
title to humanity in war. It is said that when General Earley* 
was at York, a newspaper was brought to him, containing an 
account of the burning of Blufiton, in South Carolina, and Jack- 
sonville, in Florida. He called his officers together, and read it 
to them, with the observation: "Gentlemen, I read this to you,, 
not to stimulate revenge, but as a warning. Let no such acts as 
these disgrace our arms." 

We have such men among our soldiers too. No reproach 
were attached to such commanders as McClellan, Buell, Meade 
and others: and many a subordinate to generals of a different 
nature has shuddered at the work before him, and almost hesi- 
tated in his obedience. But the favorites of our rulers have not 
been these. Humanity in warfare was no part of their pro- 
gramme. To reclaim after victory by protection, justice and 
kindness, no part of their policy, f Hence the entire alienation: 
of every friend of the Union in the Southern States. 



f I have heard General Butler called the right man in the right 
place, by persons quite incapable of approving the tyranny and rapacity 
which were not only his practice, but his boast. In his speech at 
New York, in April, 1863, which in this very part was highly ap- 
plauded, he said, in reference to the inhabitants of the conquered 
South, "They have the right, so long as they behave themselves, and 
are non-combatants, to be free from personal violence. They have no 
other rights: and, therefore, it was my duty to see to it, and I believe 
(2) 



18 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



There is another feature of our warfare which has won for our 
armies and their generals the most deserved reproach. The 
destruction of towns and cities when abandoned ; and not only 
the indiscriminate burning and pillage of all property, but often 
the surrender of the unfortunate inhabitants to the malignant 
punishment of the returning rebels, against whom our authorities 
had promised them protection. 

The latest and perhaps the most dreadful instance of this was 
the burning of Alexandria on the Red River. When General 
Banks took possession, he assured the inhabitants that the oc- 
cupation would be permanent, and guaranteed the safety and 
property of all who would approve their loyalty by submissive 
oaths, and taking part in the reorganizing of the State. A con- 
siderable number r it is said, nearly a thousand of the inhabitants 
enlisted in his army, and some eminent citizens took part in the 
civil administration under the Union. Several, relying on this 
protection, were absent in New Orleans ; one of whom was a 
member of the Constitutional Convention at the time of the dis- 
astrous battle of Grand Ecore. The retreat which followed was 
full of disaster to the army, but the ruin which fell upon the 
city was most terrible of all. No one has accused General 
Banks of ordering the conflagration; but he is, nevertheless, 
hardly less criminal in his neglect of every precaution to pre- 
vent a catastrophe which frequent and recent experience proved 
most probable. The opportunity of plunder was doubtless the 
object of the active culprits. All attempts to arrest the fire 
were in vain, for when checked in one place it was rekindled in 
another. When the wretched inhabitants, a large part of whom 



the record will show that I did see to it, that order was preserved, and 
that every man who behaved well, and did not aid the Confederate 
States, should not be molested in his person. I held that every thing 
else they had was at the mercy of the conquerors" General MouraviefF. 
who adopted, with some refined improvements, General Butler's cele- 
brated order about disloyal ladies, would have applauded, but hardly 
have dared, even in Warsaw, to imitate his illustrious exemplar in this. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



19 



were women and children, some of whose natural protectors were 
in the Union ranks, nocked to the shores, beseeching to be taken 
on board the steamers, they were refused, even driven back by 
bayonets. The space that might have been their refuge was 
occupied by cotton bales and a number of fugitive slaves, esti- 
mated at three thousand. And thus, all that remained of the 
inhabitants of this beautiful, happy, and prosperous city, were 
pitilessly abandoned. 

And yet there was found a body of our clergy and laity, as- 
sembled in the late Convention of the Episcopal Church, capable 
of voting that "This Rebellion has more and more assumed a 
character of barbarous fanaticism and murderous ferocity, on the 
part of the enemies of the nation," and that "the authors and 
abettors of this Rebellion, wherever they are found, are alone 
guilty of all the bloodshed and desolation on either side entailed 
by this contest upon North and South, now or hereafter," and 
in consequence ready to pledge the Protestant Episcopal Church 
in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, as a body of Christian men, to 
sustain the administration in all its efforts to suppress this 
"monstrous" Rebellion, by their prayers, their sympathy and 
their support. It is true, the excellent resolution of Dr. Van 
Dusen, in which all Christians could join, was substituted for 
those presented by the Provost of our University, but the still 
more objectionable preamble just quoted was carried, by some 
legislative jugglery, I do not doubt; for it could hardly have 
received the assent of those excellent men, whose Christian 
spirit and moral courage were shown in the previous debate and 
vote. I am also willing to believe that the votes of many 
others were given in entire ignorance of facts, and men who 
read only the abolitionized newspapers of the day, and have few 
associates but the uncompromising war-Christians of their vestry, 
can have a very imperfect knowledge of the truth. So was it, 
too, in the protest of our clergy against Bishop Hopkins' letter 
on "the Bible View of Slavery," which I am convinced many 
never could have signed if the committee demanding their sub- 



20 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



scription, had at the same time furnished a copy of the work to 
be denounced.* 

The body of our clergy are humble, pious men, devoted to the 
labors of their parishes, which absorb every thought, unless 
distracted by the care of a family miserably provided for. Till 
now they have not been forced to express an opinion on any of 
the topics which divide the country, and have no doubt felt that 
their own duties could hardly be performed, if the sins and im- 
moralities of distant regions were to be the objects of their in- 
quiry, even if Christian charity did not forbid it. But there are 
others of controlling influence, whose associations and knowledge 



* With all due respect, I would inquire of the ardent Abolitionists 
among our churchmen, whether any respectable body or individual 
among our laity has not a right to demand of the learned doctors and 
bishops of our church, as the authorized teachers of Christian faith and 
morals, their opinion as to the doctrines of the Bible and the church 
upon any subject brought before the public, and most especially if it 
be one already introduced into political controversy, with an appeal 
to the Bible as authorizing or condemning it. When reverend rheto- 
ricians have made any subject upon which an election may hang, the 
topic of weekly diatribes from their pulpits, have we not a right to know 
from the most venerable fathers of the church what doctrine they 
hold ?— and is it wrong to publish that opinion ? 

Suppose a party of fanatics and socialists, too often kindred spirits, 
were to present a political platform, in which general repudiation of 
debts was a feature, and the Bible denunciations of usury and usurers 
(far more frequent, I believe, than any allusion to the "sin" of 
slavery) appealed to, to justify the sweeping away of all indebtedness by 
States and individuals, would it be unbecoming in our venerable and 
learned diocesan to answer a letter from the leading capitalists of his 
communion, asking permission to publish his exposition of the mean- 
ing of these frequent allusions to the wickedness of usurers found in 
all parts of the word of God ? If not, then, what right has he and his 
clergy to condemn the Bishop of Vermont, even could it be shown, 
which cannot be, that his letter was furnished to be used in the 
coming political campaign ? 



THE CRUELTIES OP WAR. 



21 



have a larger scope — many who have met their brethren of the 
Southern church in general conventions — some who have held 
cures in the Slave States, or, visiting them for health, have been 
received with the greatest affection and hospitality by their 
brethren in Christ. None know better than these, that such 
men as Bishops Oty, Johns, Green, Elliot, Davis, and Rutledge, 
and their large body of humble, pious clergy, their generous, 
devoted and virtuous laity, are as incapable of cruelty, inhu- 
manity or any base unworthy act, as the best men the Northern 
church could ever boast of. They know, for they have seen, 
with what untiring zeal, what personal sacrifice, what real sin- 
cerity they have devoted themselves to the religious and moral 
education of the black population around them, and with what 
success ; and yet they dare denounce them as guilty of a heinous 
crime for uniting with their fellow-citizens in the defence of in- 
stitutions which they have inherited, and which they consci- 
entiously believe best calculated for the social and eternal good 
of all parties within their separate communities. They have ex- 
pressed their willingness to support measures which, if carried 
out, they know must ruin every churchman's family, destroy 
every church institution at the South, scatter every Sunday- 
school, and leave the miserable objects of their pseudo-philan- 
throphy to die in misery, vice and degradation, as they are now 
doing by hundreds daily, in all the regions at the South under 
Federal authority. By this uncalled for entry into the political 
arena, they are doing all they can to inflame the passions of 
civil war, by putting religion where it has no place, by rejoicing 
in bloody battles, and praying for victory over their brethren — 
rarely, if ever, preaching the blessed doctrines of mercy and 
peace. 

In the revision of the almost inspired liturgy of the Church 
of England after the American Revolution, our general con- 
vention expunged (to my wonder and regret) what I have ever 
thought the most beautiful of the ejaculations and its response : — 
"Give Peace in our time, Good Lord! 
Because there is none other that fighteth for us save 
Thou only, oh God!" 



22 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



Why was it rejected? Did our fathers anticipate the time 
when many of their successors would no longer, in their hearts, 
offer up this holy prayer? And may we not admit, with hu- 
miliation and contrition, that we have not prayed for peace, and, 
consequently, our God has not fought for us. 

Did it never strike the minds of our Northern clergy, that the 
bombardment of Charleston with burning shells, which could in 
no way effect the fortresses in the harbor, was cruel and vindic- 
tive beyond the necessities of war?* That the selection as a 
target of the heaven-pointing spire of St. Michael's, one of the 
most venerable churches in our country; the church of Bishops 
Dehon, Bowen and Gadsden, and of that blind and saintly pre- 

* Since the above was in type, the question of the bombardment of 
Charleston has been brought to an "issue," in the correspondence be- 
tween the Rebel General Jones and General Foster of the Union army. 
It is unnecessary to discuss the question, according to the laws of war, 
of General Jones' conduct, and the retaliation proposed. The threatened 
exposure of the Southern prisoners on the decks of the monitors, would 
seem alone justified by some such atrocity as the imprisonment of the 
Northern officers in Fort Sumter. Every act of the sort, calculated 
to provoke retaliation, is to be deplored, and even condemned; but 
in General Foster's letter there is an assertion that "Charleston is a 
depot for military supplies, and contains not only arsenals, but also 
foundries and factories for the manufacture of munitions of war. In 
its yards several iron-clads have ahead}' been completed, while others 
are still upon the stocks in the course of completion. Its wharves and 
the banks of the rivers, o-n both sides of the city, are lined with bat- 
teries. To destroy these means of continuing the war, is therefore our 
object and duty." This statement seems to have much weight; but if 
the General would inform himself, as the writer has, without any illegal 
correspondence, he would probably find that the part of Charleston 
within the furthest reach of his bombs contains no arsenals, nor foundries, 
nor manufactories of munitions of war. That the dock-yards exposed 
to fire have been abandoned, and that the ironclads, finished and under 
construction, are for the present quite safe up Cooper River ; that the 
low batteries around the shores would only be available if the Union 
fleet had passed and silenced Forts Sumter, Moultrie, Ripley, etc., and 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



23 



late Davis, was a sacrilege? Did it never occur to them that 
the special choice of Christmas as a day to scatter a fiery shower 
of bombs over a Christian city, was the strangest of all celebra- 
tions of the birth of our Redeemer, the Prince of Peace? St. 
Michael's is still, I have heard, frequented by many of its wor- 
shippers, who, I doubt not, pray for their enemies ; while shells 
are constantly heard exploding in the air, and God has hitherto 
protected the sacred pile from all injury. 

There is yet to be published the first vindictive address by the 
clergy of the South. Not because they have no grounds; for 
besides the injuries of open warfare, the brutal natures of Butler 
and Andy Johnson, and whoever may be pro-consul in Missouri, 

were in the inner harbor, when, in fact, all farther resistance would 
be futile, and that probably the only buildings used for army purposes 
within reach of the great guns of the fleet and Fort Wagner, are some 
large edifices, including the old citadel, appropriated as hospitals. All 
this might very well have been supposed as the course of prudence. 
The only parts of the city exposed to injury are the seats of former 
commerce, now entirely deserted, and the quarter called South Bay, 
looking out towards the sea, filled with the residences of the better 
classes of its citizens. There is reason to believe that few or none of the 
bombs have kindled the conflagation anticipated, but they have pene- 
trated a great many private dwellings, so that safety and tranquility 
both stimulate their abandonment. In no city would this condition be 
attended by greater hardships. The plantation residences, even when 
unreached by Union raiders, are uninhabitable after May, the coast 
islands no longer a safe resort; and deprived of their city houses, the 
people of Charleston are homeless. The story of the bloody interrup- 
tion of the marriage of Miss Pickens, told with so many touching in- 
cidents, has been recently contradicted ; but it might well have been 
true. Other casualties, equally distressing, if not so dramatic, have 
certainly occurred in humble families, who, finding no shelter, have 
returned to risk death in the burning ruins of their homes. "Whether 
they have a claim to forbearance from our batteries, when a trial of so 
many months has shown their fire to be only fruitful of domestic 
misery, I must leave for others to say; but if this be legitimate warfare, 
I know not where in Christianity to find a sanction for it. 



24 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



have selected some of the worthiest of our clergy, and those of 
the Presbyterian church, who had taken sides with their con- 
gregations, as objects of wanton cruelty and insult. 

I presume the name of the venerable and Rev. James Arm- 
strong of the Presbyterian church, at Norfolk, is known to some 
of our clergy. He was sentenced to clean the streets, with ball 
and chain on his legs, not because he would not acquiesce in or 
obey the Federal authority, but because in his honest answers to 
questions, most artfully arranged, he would not condemn the 
Southern government and people. The Rev. Mr. Painter, of 
Missouri, was perhaps seen by some of them a few weeks ago — 
though it may be the story of so disloyal a man would not be 
believed. He had refused the special oath to support the 
measures of Mr. Lincoln, and says he was dragged from his 
church or home, confined a prisoner in a camp of ruffians, where 
he performed, on compulsion, the most menial and filthy work, 
and even, with the hands which were wont to present the cup of 
salvation, was obliged to saw wood for the mulatto mistress of a 
Northern officer. If these stories are doubted, let our clergy 
inquire into their truth, before they again venture on resolutions 
to support all the measures of the Northern authorities, and 
condemn all the acts of their Southern fellow-churchmen. 

Up to the beginning of our fatricidal war, the Episcopal 
church remained a bond of brotherly union and holy fellowship, 
while the clergy of other Protestant sects have been for up- 
wards of thirty years doing every thing to alienate the religious 
people of the South, and prepare their minds for the disruption 
of our Republic. Has the virus of Eastern infidelity at last 
affected us ; poisoned our affections, distorted our intellects and 
instilled the fatal heresy of a higher law than God has given us 
in his word? Let our ministers beware of thinking themselves 
better Christians and wiser interpreters of God's will and words 
than the Whites, the Moores, the Seaburys, and others who 
established in our church a Union with slaveholders, and, oh! 
let them not forget, in the bitter excitement of sectional politics, 
that the principles and doctrines of the religion they profess to 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



25 



teach -Harrr rnn have no entry to the human heart but by the 
portals of brotherly love, tender mercy, and holy peace. 

It may be fairly asked, what have religion and morality 
gained? What can they possibly gain by this dreadful war? 

I will not go into the battle-field, that carnival of devilish 
passions, nor enter the camp, that nursery of every degrading 
vice, but beg my readers to reflect upon the awful change, the 
shocking demoralization of our fellow-citizens taken from the 
quiet walks of peaceful industry and exposed to every tempta- 
tion to wickedness ; where the greatest honor is to the hand 
most deeply dyed in the blood of his countrymen, to the heart 
most inaccessible to pity ; where human affections must be stifled 
and every private right contemned; wnere licentious passions 
can have no restraint, and violence and rapine gain the highest 
rewards. After such a war as ours, one well may shudder to 
think of the time when our common soldiers will return to their 
homes, and spread among our community the infection of the 
moral diseases they have contracted, or startle us with their 
lawlessness, their ferocity and crimes.* 

But it is not necessary to anticipate. I would rather call 
attention to present results, and the dreadful corruption and 



* I hope I shall not be accused of sentimental philanthropy, and 
especially of any sympathy with the Peace Society, whose distinguished 
orators had no more of my admiration in former days than they have 
now. I think Washington and Gustavus Adolphus much more worthy 
of our veneration than Wilberforce, Raikes and Father Matthew ; but 
instead of defending my opinions, I would quote the words of one of 
the noblest, bravest, and most religious soldiers England or the world 
ever produced, General Sir William Napier. In a letter to his mother, 
written within the lines of Torras Vedras, he says: "I am a soldier, 
unfitted for any other profession, and yet I took up my present one 
lightly and without consideration. I detest it. We are but licensed 
murderers, and the most brutal and ferocious sentiments are constantly 
expressed, and actions of the same stamp committed by us and our 
allies. This I cannot prevent, nor can I leave the place or people 
where and by whom they are committed," etc. 



26 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



degradation of our people in the short period of three years. 
To my own mind, the most discouraging and depressing sign is 
the apparent extinction of moral perception; the willingness to 
tolerate every bad act and every bad man that wins success. 
All must admit that there is an astonishing change in the men 
who have gained power and place by the opportunities the war 
has given. All have observed the sudden elevation of the lowest, 
by means which should shun inspection, and the extravagant and 
profligate display of wealth most dishonestly acquired; and in 
public life, the men whom the popular vote has selected for posts 
upon which the safety of everything we should value depends, 
are the astonishment of the world. 

When we look at Washington, the capital of our country, a 
scene so shocking presents itself, that we hardly know whether 
it should rather call forth our scorn and indignation, or our 
humiliation and grief. For the present, I leave to others the 
accusation of the administration and its measures, and I wait 
for the awakened conscience of our people to condemn its deeds. 
But it is no libel to say, what all who recollect the past must 
perceive, that every tradition of dignity and honor is abandoned 
by our government, the Constitution defied, and all the ancient 
bulwarks of law and liberty thrown down. 

The majority of our representatives, the delegates of a party 
whose motives are rarely dignified by the sincerity of their 
fanaticism, would stifle all debate ; for they quail under the 
denunciations of the opposition, and would brand as false and 
treasonable words which they know to be the utterance of loyal 
and patriotic hearts. 

The Senate, which, for its dignity and experienced statesman- 
ship, we once regarded as the great balance wheel of government, 
is equally degraded. What are our senators now ? The repre- 
sentatives of sovereign States ? The majority have abjured this 
sovereignty, and are only now the miserable puppets of a party. 
And the Supreme Court, which we were wont to honor for its 
learning, its purity and courage — whose decrees had their force 
in the reverence and obedience of every honest heart : Alas ! 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



27 



how weak and powerless now ! stript of authority, the ghost of 
its former self — a warning and a witness of our ruin. 

With such a national legislature, can we wonder that every 
department is a scene of peculation and fraud? That villainy 
no longer blushes at detection, and hardly an effort is made to 
punish the official or contractor who defrauds the treasury, and 
cheats the soldier? that contracts are given in exchange for 
political influence, or sold for a share in the plunder ? that places 
in the departments are bestowed not only on worthless party 
parasites, but on the ministers of vice? After all our boasts of 
virtue, has it come to this, that the paramours of officials are 
supported by salaries which should have maintained the virtuous 
wives and daughters of our soldiers? There seems little doubt 
of it. Indeed the whole city is a scene of open debauchery. 
The old and respectable inhabitants are daily abandoning it ; and 
almost every house, (in the central and built parts,) not occupied 
by government, congress, the army, and the trades dependant on 
them, is devoted to drinking, gambling, or prostitution.* A 
modest woman cannot go alone into the streets, hardly into any 
public assembly ; and even the house of the President is shunned 
by many whose delicacy revolts at his conversation, and recoils 
from contact with some of his most favored guests. 

Ominous of our national ruin is the fate of our proud capital, 
bearing the honored name of its great and glorious founder, 
where our fathers fondly hoped to establish an Acropolis, a seat 
of Honor, on which Wisdom, and Virtue, and Religion would be 
enthroned; but where we can only now see a volcanic abyss, 
rapidly swallowing up all that we value and venerate, all that is 
noble, pure and holy : pouring forth at the same time a poisonous 
vapor which maddens and stupefies our people, and covering the 
whole land with a lava-flood of corruption. 

Though Washington affords the nearest and most disgraceful 
picture, similar scenes are enacted in many other places. Wher- 
ever, indeed, the National authority is maintained by military 



* 18,000 prostitutes were last winter counted among the population. 



28 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



rule; there general license and proconsular tyranny and op- 
pression carry us back to the worst times of Roman history. 
Those who, four years since, visited Nashville, Memphis and 
Natchez, found them the abodes of refined, virtuous and hospita- 
ble people. What a change now ! The best inhabitants, if still 
remaining, skulking in their own houses, and hardly there escap- 
ing the insolent intrusion of the Northern and negro soldier. 
If the military or police authorities require a house, it must be 
relinquished with all its furniture ; and we hear of many a one so 
taken, made a scene of coarse debauchery. Instead of the 
modest lady who before administered the household, sometimes 
a quadroon girl is seen dressed from the sequestered wardrobe 
of its former occupant, or flaunting in silks and jewelry in a 
sequestered carriage by the side of a Federal officer : while the 
black provost guard, under colored officers, make domiciliary 
visits in town and country, and give their own account of 
them; for the press is muzzled, and beyond a timid remon- 
strance to Governor Andy Johnson, in a Nashville paper, has 
published nothing; and although private letters give sad stories 
of violence and insult, there are some outrages of which even 
the sufferers will not speak. 

The government at Washington has full reports of the organ- 
ized plunder and extortion which at New Orleans and Norfolk 
have been added to the minor visitations I have detailed;* and 1 



* A custom-house official, at Beaufort or New Orleans, might give 
as some striking details of exportation to the North. Such spoils of 
bloodless victory as never were displayed at the triumph of a Roman 
consul. Not only silver, pictures and porcelain, carefully packed to 
grace the homes of New England, but law and clerical libraries, fur- 
niture of all kinds, and especially piano-fortes. The sobriquet of a 
certain brigadier-general among the soldiers was General Piano, from 
his large acquisitions of that article. Even the tombs of the dead 
were not despised by our merchant soldiers. The New Orleans Era 
tolls us that the stately monument of Colonel Charles D. Dreux, the 
youthful orator, who fell early in the war in command of a Confederate 



THE CRUELTIES OF "WAR. 



29 



refer to Governor Pierpont's report, to prove how much so poor 
a place as the latter city can yield. Throughout the conquered 
land, every home is desolate, and every ancient centre of peaceful 
industry now a scene of idleness, profligacy or misery. When 
the missionaries of freedom first visited the plantations round 
Port Royal, they were astonished to find few or no mulattoes. 
The reports of the second year of occupation tell of a large crop 
of hybrids, which, to the virtuous advocates of miscegenation, 
may perhaps compensate for the almost entire failure of the old 
production, cotton. The brutal planter has been succeeded in 
these regions by the pure and noble young soldier from the land 
of steady habits. I leave it to better authorities than myself to 
show with what effect upon the virtue and domestic happiness 
of the sable peasantry. 

But the barbarous fanaticism and murderous ferocity which a 
majority of the convention says is the characteristic of Southern 
warfare ? I ask for their instances. Perhaps they think that 
Colonel Turchin was a Southerner, and his men the sand-hillers 
of South Carolina ; the dirt-eaters of Alabama ; or, may be, 
they never heard of the capture of Athens, a small unfortified 
town by a body of troops consisting, we must believe, of the 
exiled ruffians of foreign lands. "Would that that night of 
horror, of brutal, lustful outrage were a myth ! a dream of that 
Union officer, who announced to his soldiers, "that for two hours 
he would shut his eyes and enjoy unbroken repose," which even 
the shrieks of women could not disturb. I will not repeat the 
incidents of which the government had evidence. Was Colonel 
Turchin degraded and punished? Alas, no! He was advancd 
in rank. He is now a general — one of those whom our king 
delighteth to honor. 

batallion, constructed at the cost of 81500, was sold, and brought under 
the hammer of the auctioneer $100. Another of great beauty was 
sold as low as 830. They are no doubt now admired in some Northern 
cemetery, where a slight substitution of names and dates may fit them 
to commemorate the virtues and valor of some gallant officer of the 
army of occupation. 



30 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



I cannot pass unmentioned the tragedy of Palmyra, where 
ten citizens of imputed Southern sympathies were seized as host- 
ages for the production of one Andrew Allman, who had dis- 
appeared, (kidnapped perhaps, or murdered,) and after ten days 
delay publicly shot by order of General McNeill. Such acts as 
these remind one of the days of James II., and the atrocities 
which followed the battle of Sedgemoor ; and strange to tell, 
the deed of the English Colonel Kirk, whose name, after near 
two centuries, is never mentioned without an expression of 
horror, found an imitator in Colonel Strachan, the provost mar- 
shal of Missouri. Nor is this hearsay; the evidence of the 
miserable shame-stricken wife is on record. Retaliation was 
threatened by the Confederate government, but never executed. 

If necessary other instances of cruelty and outrage on the 
part of commissioned officers might be cited. It must be re- 
membered that these deeds, by remaining unpunished, have 
the sanction of the government at Washington; and being 
heard and read without public outcry and indignation, are a 
stain and disgrace to our people. 

I may be reminded by an advocate of the war of subjugation, 
that these acts, if not finding precise parallels in the atrocities of 
the Southern army, (which cannot, I believe, be cited,) were pro- 
voked or imitated by the guerrillas of the Western States — the 
Jayhawkers of Missouri and Arkansas — -that west of our great 
river no Union citizen is safe from fire and plunder and murder ; 
that the peaceful commerce of every Western stream is stopped 
by concealed batteries or platoons of musketry in every thicket ; 
that no traveler can venture a mile beyond the few towns guarded 
by our soldiers, without hearing the whiz of a bullet about his 
ears, and that these treacherous enemies must be exterminated, 
or every attempt to cultivate the plantations on the Southern 
Mississippi must soon be abandoned. I deny it not. 

Such has been the character of the contest in these half settled 
States from the beginning of the war. Such, indeed, in a measure, 
in some of them, since the time when the Emigrant Society of 



THE CRUELTIES OP WAR. 



31 



New England collected her fanatics and vagrants, and sent 
them armed with pikes and rifles to Kansas, to circumvent the 
plans of the people of Missouri for the control of the institutions 
of their Western neighbors. It would take many acts of "border 
ruffianism" to fill up the measure of blood shed at Ottawattomie. 

So many tales are told of violence on both sides, that it is 
utterly impossible to strike the balance of crime; but among 
those whose names have been the terror of the Union people of 
the West, there are some who could tell a story of wrongs, which, 
but for the teaching of that holy religion which forbids all private 
vengeance, mi^ht find in human hearts some excuse for their 
bloody deeds, at all events might mitigate the punishment for 
their guilt. 

Perhaps no one is charged with a greater catalogue of crimes 
than Champ. Ferguson, of Kentucky. What he was in early 
life, I know not ; but when the war broke out he was living, I 
am told, with his beautiful young wife at his home in his native 
State. Having taken the Southern side, his safety was threat- 
ened, and he fled or concealed himself. His house was entered 
by some of his loyal neighbors, and his wife, who it seems was 
celebrated for her dancing, was brought out upon the green, 
stripped naked, and obliged to dance before that brutal crowd 
till she fainted. She awoke to madness or idiocy. The ven- 
geance her husband threatened on all who took part in this 
outrage, he is repaying, and is still unsatisfied. 

Quantrell, too, lays claim to a large account of injuries un- 
settled ; his house burnt, and shameful outrages to his family to 
revenge, and his company is filled up with men, all, it is said, 
bereft of homes, or wives, or children.* A fearful bond of 



* No outrage of this ferocious band gave rise to more indignant 
eloquence, in the Republican press and pulpit, than the sack and burn- 
ing of the town of Lawrence, in Kansas. Large collections were raised 
for the sufferers, and envoys sent to minister to their wants, and give 
assurance of revenge. One of these envoys, the Eev. Robert Collyer, 
who went from Chicago, said in a public address delivered on his re- 



32 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



blood. I do not deny nor doubt that the Republicans of the 
West have their own tales of brutal injury, but such as these I 
have not heard. Such once was border war between Scotland 
and England; such may be war now in China and Ashantee; 
but such acts have not been chronicled in Christendom since we 
became a nation. No officer in the service of the Union showed 
himself fitter for this border warfare than Colonel Montgomery, 
of Missouri. His successes in the reconquest, if it should not 
be rather called the desolation of that unhappy State, gained 
him the highest tribute of praise, and he w T as subsequently se- 
lected to command the negro troops of the South, where his 
achievements in burning towns, and ravaging plantations, were, 
if less glorious, at least less bloody. 

But our philanthropic clergymen may say: we have still the 
outrages to the poor negro to present ; the barbarous slaughter 
of those brave soldiers, when overpowered in the heroic fight for 
liberty. The massacre of Fort Pillow has been a fruitful theme 
for eloquence in congress, halls and pulpits, and a committee of 
congress has reported a tale of horror quite answering the de- 
mand. I am not going to criticize that report, or to try to 
spoil the picture by hinting discrepancies and falsehoods ; but 
observe that those who are at all familiar with history, and re- 
collect the annals of any great war, can, if they will, recall to 
mind the account of towns taken by assault, when every thing 
perpetrated at Pillow, even greater horrors have been acted. 
The story of the capture of Badajos, by a disciplined and Chris- 
tian army, under England's noblest captain, freezes the blood 
with horror. Such deeds are horrible, are wicked; but there 



turn, " That the best citizens of Lawrence, including business men and 
ministers, sufferers by the recent calamity, gave it as their opinion, 
that no such dreadful deed of vengeance would have been done, but 
for the hostile and unwarranted predatory raids made upon the border 
counties of Missouri, by men who are professedly representing the 
feeling of the citizens of Lawrence; but who are in reality animated 
solely by a desire to steal, plunder and spoliate." 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



33 



are times, in the madness of victory, when the heart and mind 
have no control over the most savage passions of our nature, 
and this was one. One only ascertained fact I would recall, is 
that the negro troops losing their head, which they ever will in 
panic, did not surrender, but fled — some carrying off their mus- 
kets and firing them in their flight. 

That the black troops in the Union service have been special 
objects of Southern hostility in battle, and treated with little 
mercy after defeat, is very true. The exasperation their enlist- 
ment has caused throughout the South is intense, and many a 
Union man of the border States has abjured his loyalty when he- 
saw people of that race in the uniform of his country. Need I 
explain this feeling to any native American ? And if repugnance 
exist here, how much more must the sense of indignity be en- 
hanced among those whose servants have been seized, in viola- 
tion of every constitutional and State right ; employed in police 
service, as if to give the greatest possible offence; sent on ex- 
peditions to plunder their masters property, and especially put 
forward as heralds of emancipation, and, if needs be, stimulators 
of servile war ; instruments, indeed, often most reluctant, of 
these great designs of our administration. If they have cruelly 
suffered, they may thank their Northern friends. 

But besides these causes of rancor, there were special acts 
of violence and outrage by these poor, ignorant creatures, these 
freedmen soldiers, newly educated in the duties of hatred, plun- 
der and murder, which have inspired vindictiveness. The re- 
ports of some of these have reached the North, others have 
been suppressed in the silence of the grave. The captors of 
Fort Pillow may have been inflamed by the recollection of some 
such incident as the butchery of Mr. Beckman's family, at Com- 
promise Landing, Tennessee, on the 4th of August, 1863, by 
fourteen or sixteen negroes, in the uniform of the United States, 
from the camp at Island No. 10;* or the robbery and murder 



* I have seen the account of this horrible crime in a Chicago paper. 
In it perished Mr. Beckman, his octogenerian father. Major Beckman, 
(3) 



34 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR* 



of the Neff family, near Fort Hudson, by seven armed negroes 
last January; or the still more recent story of poor old John 
Bobb, near Vicksburg, who threw a stone at a negro soldier 
while robbing his garden, and for this was seized by a file of 
fifteen or twenty black men, led by their sergeant, carried to a 
bayou or hollow, within pistol shot of their general's quarters, 
and there barbarously shot; and when the poor old man cried 
out for their officers, was answered, "d — n the officers, we can fix 
you without officers?" They may have heard of an affair occur- 
ing not long before at Vicksburg, which, as at first published in 
Northern papers, was described as a massacre of innocent ne- 
groes, (encamped in the neighborhood of a fine establishment, 
which had escaped the ravages of war,) assassinated by a party 
of guerrillas from across the river, who shot and bayonetted 
them with the greatest atrocity, and then decamped ; the house 
referred to being at the same time burnt. An explanation since 
given, is that this house, which had formerly been a place of 
resort for planters and their families, was filled with ladies and 
children, and their colored nurses, who had fled from their burn- 
ing houses and plantations ; that some negro troops stationed in 



and four young children. Nothing could exceed the fiendish cruelty 
of the act. The bodies, some of them covered with fearful wounds, 
were thrown into the water, but still remained to give their testi- 
mony. A neighbor, who scarcely escaped the violence of the murderers, 
was also witness of the scene, and all was confirmed by the full confes- 
sion of some of the murderers who were arrested. They accused Cap- 
tain Gwin as the contriver and instigator of the deed. This Gwin 
had the command of a contraband camp at or near Island No. 10, not 
as a military man, but an instructor, where he, his wife, and a Rev. 
Mr. Thomas, had for about six months conducted a school designed to 
prepare these victims of Southern barbarity for the assumption of the 
rights and duties of citizens. Whether Gwin was guilty or not cannot 
be ascertained. He claimed the benefit of the old laws of Tennessee 
excluding negro testimony, and I have seen no report of the punishment 
of the murderers or the capture of those who escaped with the plunder, 
said to be a very considerable sum in gold and paper money. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



35 



the neighborhood burst in upon them, and without distinction com- 
mitted outrages on all, more horrible than murder, and then 
burnt the house ; that the avengers were not Southern guerrillas, 
but the soldiers of an Indiana regiment, who, with the know- 
ledge and assent of their officers, exacted a punishment which 
the courts might not be able to inflict, or which our benevolent 
President might have frustrated under the influence of philan- 
thropists, who shudder at the antiquated barbarity of the gallows. 
If the first version of this story were true, and it must have been 
known at Washington, why was not the Fort Pillow committee 
charged to extend their inquiries to this greater atrocity; this 
insidious surprise and deliberate murder of unoffending men? 
The scene was quite as bloody, the picture would have been far 
more effective. 

In other times, I might ask, why inquiries were not instituted 
into the truth of Commodore Porter's charges against the con- 
traband soldiers near Vicksburg, who he says, in his report to 
the department of about the same date, had been guilty of great 
outrages ? Is it because our freedmen soldiers can do no wrong, 
or because, on the high authority of the Hon. Mr. Lovejoy, so 
often repeated by our popular speakers, as to seem an accepted 
dictum of our public law, that the slave-owner has no rights 
which the negro is bound to respect?* 

Over and over again, when I have spoken of the horrors of 
this war to my friends, some of them among the most benevolent 

* In a recent number of the New York Tribune, the correspondent 
of that paper, writing from Bermuda Hundred, narrates the following 
conversation : " Well," said General Butler's chief of staff to a tall ser- 
geant, (negro,) u you had a pretty tough fight there on the left.'" 
** Yes, sir, and we lost a good many good officers and men." " How 
many prisoners did you take, sergeant?" u Notany, alive, sir," was 
the significant response. General Smith says, " They don't give my 
provost-marshal the least trouble, and I don't believe they contribute 
towards jilUng any of the hospitals with rebel wounded." As the cor- 
respondent of the Tribune says, this is significant, and I quote it with- 
out comment. 



36 THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 

people I have ever known, and pictured the suffering and desola- 
tion of Southern families, I am met by the assertion, " They 
have brought it on themselves. Had their States never se- 
ceded; had they never fired on the National flag, or seized the 
National fortresses and arsenals, they would have been spared 
all this suffering; that Rebellion must be put down, and treason 
punished, and for whatever suffering must fall to the share of 
the peaceable and innocent, their political leaders are chiefly 
accountable, and by supporting them in their crime, they have 
brought the punishment on themselves." Few pause to reflect 
whether the verdict of history is likely to sustain their judg- 
ment, or inquire whether the wise and good of other lands re- 
gard, as they do, secession "as a stupendous wickedness, a crime 
which words cannot fitly characterize." Far be it from me, to 
defend the act, which I have ever condemned as unjustifiable, 
till every mode of redress under the constitution had been 
tried in vain. If not a crime, it was a fatal mistake, one 
of those political blunders which are worse than a crime in 
their effects; like many an error in private life, which is more 
fatal to happiness than an immoral act, and which sometimes 
involves in misery, disgrace and ruin, those whose honor and 
whose motives are beyond reproach. That the great body 
of politicians at the South, almost all who read or wrote, or 
thought on constitutional subjects, sincerely believed in the right 
of peaceable secession, when the Union should become oppressive, 
when the stipulated articles of the constitution should be broken 
or threatened, when the domestic institutions of their States should 
be endangered, needs no evidence to prove. The States of Vir- 
ginia, New York and Rhode Island, which reluctantly acceded 
to the Union, all claimed in their solemn act, which finally rati- 
fied the contract, the right "to resume the powers granted by 
them whenever they should be perverted to their injury and 
oppression," and of this contingency they alone could be the 
judges. Many Northern authorities might be cited in confirma- 
tion. Mr. Lincoln himself, in his speech in congress, January 
12, 1848, went much further in the deliberate enunciation of his 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 37 

principles. His words are, " Any people, any where, being in- 
clined and having the potver, have the right to rise up and shake 
off the existing government. Nor is this right confined to cases 
in which the whole people of an existing government may choose 
to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revo- 
lutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they 
inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such 
people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled 
with or near about them, who may oppose their movements." 
And this, he asserts, "is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a 
right which we believe is to liberate the world." And all this 
was said with reference to Texas, which had rebelled against 
Mexico, that it might establish itself as a Slave State, against 
the organic law of the Republic. Far be it from me to quote 
this dictum as an authority. It is only the broadest enunciation 
of the doctrine of secession I have met with, going far beyond the 
opinions of Southern statesmen and jurists, inasmuch as it asserts 
the right to break up a confederacy or government not upon imputed 
injuries, but whenever inclination and power combined to prompt 
it. But it was an honest opinion, as, I presume, no Republican 
will dispute, upon which he might have acted without turpitude, 
and this is all that is necessary for me to show in its application. 

Nor had Mr. Lincoln changed his principles on his accession 
to the Presidency, for on the Sunday before the adjournment of 
the extra session of Congress, in 1861, he said to Mr. Mallory, 
a Representative of Kentucky, in presence of Senator Crittenden 
and others : — "Mr. Mallory, this war, so far as I have anything 
to do with it, is carried on on the idea that there is a Union sen- 
timent in these States, which, set free from the control now held 
over it by the presence of the Confederate or rebel power, will 
be sufficient to replace those States in the Union. If I am mis- 
taken in this— if there is no such sentiment there, if the people 
of those States are determined with unanimity, or with a feeling 
approaching to unanimity, that their States shall not be members 
of this Confederacy — it is beyond the power of the people of the 
other States to force them to remain in the Union; and," said 
he, " in that contingency — in the contingency that there is not 



40 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



and the members of legislatures about to assemble were besought 
to utter words of conciliation, and support them by the imme- 
diate introduction and early passage of acts to repeal the legis- 
lation so offensive to the .South. Nothing was done. On the 
contrary, from every quarter, amidst the shouts of political 
victory, were heard the threats, "that the Southern oligarchy 
must now be trodden down and slavery crushed." 

When congress met, the Crittenden resolutions were intro- 
duced. The Republican members were assured that these meas- 
ures would satisfy Georgia, Mississippi and the rest; but their 
party discipline prevented even a divided support of them. The 
gulf States then seceded, and a still more strenous appeal was 
made on behalf of the Northern Slave States, all then containing 
large majorities for the Union, who felt in their reduced number 
they had a still stronger right to protective guarantees. The 
appeal was made in vain. The Peace Congress was suggested. 
It was packed by Northern governors, with delegates pledged 
against all compromises, men who by their violence seemed se- 
lected on purpose to make the breach irreparable. 

When the fourth of March arrived, the expectation of restora- 
tion was almost gone. Still there w T as hope of peace. Mr. 
Lincoln's inaugural disappointed all the friends of constitutional 
Union. His appointments still more so. He was urged to 
select for his cabinet, and other important places, one or more 
of the strongest Union men from the border States, such as Bell, 
Guthrie, Crittenden, Stanly, or Scott of Fauquier, whose pre- 
sence in his counsels would give the still loyal States assur- 
ance of protection. Instead of such men, the bitterest aboli- 
tionists had the highest places; and the names of Seward and 
Chase, and Burlinghame, and Schurz, and Giddings, and Pike, 
and even Helper, indicated too clearly the measures the party 
was determined to carry out. War, however, it was hoped, 
might still be averted. Under the influence of patriots who still 
remained at the seat of government, promises were sought and 
given that no hostile measures should be taken till every effort 
at peaceful settlement had failed. Mr. Seward gave assurance 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



41 



to Judge Campbell and Governor Morehead, and through Mr. 
Harvey, (our present Minister to Lisbon,) to the Southern au- 
thorities, that no attempt should be made to supply Fort Sumter 
by force, the government of South Carolina engaging to send a 
daily supply of fresh marketing to that little garrison; but two 
weeks had scarcely passed before the policy of the President was 
changed, under pressure, it is said, of the Northern governors, 
and other extreme men of his party, the very men who, while in 
a minority, were for peaceful disunion, and in their speeches and 
petitions advocated separation from slavery and its criminal sup- 
porters. As early as the 23d of March, a letter received in 
Boston announced this change of policy ; the fire of Sumter was 
to be drawn, the assault on our flag provoked. This letter 
might, if desirable, be produced; but the telegram from Mr. 
Harvey to Judge McGrath of the same date and tenor, the 
seizure and publication of which caused so much embarrasment 
at the Department of State, is all the evidence that is necessary, 
confirmed by Mr. Seward's boastful declaration at Washington, 
on the 4th of July, 1863, that he felt justified as a patriot and 
a Christian to take care that the first shot should be fired by 
the South. " That the war should be begun not by the friends 
but by the enemies of the Union." When the attack was re- 
ported to Mr. Lincoln, he was not surprised. He said, "it was 
what he expected." His plans had been prepared. His war 
proclamation resolved on, if not already written. 

It was thought by some, that the greatest of all earthly 
calamities, civil war, could still have been averted, if, instead of 
this proclamation, congress had been immediately summoned, and 
a convention of States proposed. The action of Virginia, North 
Carolina, and Tennessee might have been suspended; but it 
was not thought prudent to submit the subject to the people, 
who even in the great Northern States might still have been for 
compromise and peace. Why this course was not pursued im- 
mediately after the fourth of March, we must leave to Mr. Lin- 
coln and his advisers to answer. Why the commissioners sent 
at first by the rebel authorities were not listened to; why the 



42 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



military envoy sent to General Scott was not permitted to see 
the President; why, long after this, the Southern vice-presi- 
dent, Mr. Stevens, was not allowed to pass the lines or exhibit 
the object and terms of his mission, I leave to be explained by 
those who can best do so. Whether they were overtures for 
peace or attempts to mitigate the horrors of war, all were per- 
emptorily rejected. I will not presume to condemn the act. 
National dignity, (not always well supported,) perhaps demanded 
this course, but the spirit of brotherly love and of Christianity 
might have excused the opposite. 

No one can deny that the universal shout of the Republican 
party was "No concession or compromise, rather than yield an 
iota, now we have the power, let us have war." 

Thus was our war begun, and it has lasted already three 
years with an expense of life and treasure unequalled perhaps in 
the annals of the world. In cruelty and outrage not surpassed 
by the devastations of Louis XIV. in the Palatinate, and which 
our rulers demand shall be continued, if necessary, till the whole 
Southern country is unpeopled of its white inhabitants. It will 
be long before that day ; for, driven to desperation, its people 
will fight for their families and homes with more than Vendean 
pertinacity and courage. With us the wailing of the bereft, 
and the cry of want are now beginning to be heard, and the ruin 
we have sought to inflict upon the South now threatens to over- 
turn the whole edifice of our prosperity. 

It may be that we shall never conquer the South, and then 
we shall find that it is too late to talk of conciliation, and that 
of all the consequences of our ferocious war, the bitter and malig- 
nant passions it has every where engendered, may be the worst. 
Well may we fear that 

Never will true reconcilement grow, 

Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep. 

But trusting in, God, and beseeching Him to infuse some por- 
tion of his Holy Spirit into the hearts of our people, we may 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



43 



still hope that peace, if not long delayed, may once more bring 
its attendant blessings to our unhappy country. 

History, which we should always consult for our examples and 
warning, teaches us that great civil wars, prosecuted with the 
fiercest animosity, have ended without the extermination of the 
weaker party, and that the combatants of many years have lived 
side by side in harmony and peace. 

Germany offers an example, in that terrible contest of thirty 
years, which ended in the peace of Westphalia ; but the religious 
wars of France, in the sixteenth century, will perhaps furnish 
the most striking parallels, and give the best encouragement to 
our hopes. 

In the woful history of that period, we find a fanatical majority 
determined to destroy an almost equal number of their fellow- 
subjects, whom they were taught to believe the greatest of all 
sinners. There we find a " League," composed of the bourgeoisie 
and middle class of the great cities of France, led by the Guises 
and their party, the unprincipled and grasping demagogues of 
that day, and stimulated by a bigoted and bloody priesthood. 
There we have a monarch, timid, vacillating, vain and pitiless, 
controlled by a Camarilla, now promising protection to his hereti- 
cal subjects, and then failing in every obligation of a sovereign, 
and violating every royal pledge. The heart sickens at the 
ferocity of that bloody war, carried on with varied success till 
half the towns and castles were in ruins, and the beautiful and 
fertile land of France so ravaged that starvation vied with the 
war demon in the number of its victims. But at last, the inherit- 
ance of the miserable Charles fell to a hero and a patriot, the 
brave and generous and accomplished and humane Henry of 
Navarre. When the constitutional law of his country placed 
him at the head of his people, he found, indeed, his rights op- 
posed by that bigoted and brutal and rapacious crew, the party 
of Philip and the Guises, who were the authors of all his coun- 
try's disasters; but by his magnanimity, his justice and his 
kindness, he won the hearts and dispelled the prejudices of more 
of his enemies than he had conquered by his brilliant valor. 



44 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



When his tender compassion for the starving people of Paris 
permitted boat loads of provisions to enter that city, the strong- 
hold of his most malignant enemies, the success of the seige was 
indeed frustrated, but in a few months he had the happiness to 
enter his capital, not over the bodies of its defenders, but with 
the shouts and blessings of a delivered people. And his victory 
was secured by an universal amnesty: even his bitterest foes 
were pardoned their undoubted treason, and protected in their 
great estates. To his companions in arms, the brave and noble- 
minded Huguenots, equal rights were secured by solemn pledges 
of protection, and by cities of their own. And thus the passions 
of civil war and religious hatred were appeased; old enemies 
and their descendants lived side by side in peace for nearly a 
hundred years, till another tyrant and bigot revoked the edict of 
Nantes, and drove from his kingdom the most honest and re- 
ligious of his subjects, some of whom have transmitted their 
names and virtues to many of our countrymen. 

AVith such an example, may we not hope that our distracted 
country shall once more enjoy harmony and peace? To this end 
we must seek for an able, brave, humane and Christian states- 
man. But where is our Henry of Navarre? The accomplished 
eulogist of the "President's policy" in the North American 
Review for January, must excuse me if I cannot find his likeness 
(as he does) in Abraham Lincoln. We need, indeed, a patriot 
and a statesman whom all can trust, with whom all can heartily 
join in the great work of restoration. 

J>ut before this consummation, we must humble ourselves be- 
fore our God, beseeching him to pardon our errors and trans- 
gressions, and to root out from our hearts all evil passions ; and 
above all the demons of hatred and revenge; to teach us rather 
how we may regain the affections and confidence of our revolted 
fellow-citizens, than how we can conquer them in arms ; to show 
us a better mode of restoring the Union than by fire and blood- 
shed : — or, if this may not be, then to vouchsafe to us the influence 
of his Holy Spirit, to reconcile us to our humiliation, and enable 
us to learn in our adversities the bitter but all-important lesson of 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



45 



self-knowledge. Then may we learn that pride and arrogance 
lead nations surely to their destruction; that the condemnation 
of the sins of others is the worst mode of reforming our own; 
that interference with others rights is the surest way to sacrifice 
our own liberty; and, finally, that the "sum of all wickedness" 
is not in a social institution, which, whatever its origin and 
whatever its defects, can be shown in the Southern States of our 
confederacy to be attended with less crime and vice, and far less 
suffering than exist in the lower strata of society of any other 
people, and by the inscrutable Providence of God, has been the 
only means through, and in consequence of which, the Religion of 
his Blessed Son has ever been extensively propagated among 
the races of middle Africa; but is rather to be found in WAR, 
justly called by the Greeks "Polemos, the destroyer of States," 
whose very essence is rapine and cruelty; permitted, indeed, by 
God, as one of the great scourges of humanity, but rarely justified 
save against the invaders of our homes, our consciences, and our 
chartered rights ; war which inflicts more misery in a day than 
years can obliterate, which stimulates and gives scope to every 
wicked passion, and, as all history shows, is never more fierce, 
bloody, rapacious, cruel and tyrannical than when it usurps the 
mission of Humanity, Religion and Liberty. 



POSTSCRIPT. 



August 11. 

In the 17th page of the preceding pamphlet I ventured to 
contrast the conduct of our soldiers, at the South, with that of 
the Confederate army, as exhibited in their invasion of Pennsyl- 
vania under General Early. I might have added many other 
instances of his forbearance, and have cited cases of outrage by 
our own troops, at that time loudly complained of by those in 
whose defence they were summoned. 

A year has passed, and our unprotected borders have been 
again crossed by a small body of Southern cavalry. By the 
reports given us, they have foraged and plundered with little 
restraint, and a large part of Chambersburg has been burned. 
A great cry has been raised throughout the North, as if such 
"vandal barbarities " were new to us ; as if continued reports from 
our armies did not present to us pictures of wanton destruction 
and useless cruelty, far exceeding all that has been visited upon us. 

It seems, indeed to have been entirely forgotten that Bluffton, 
Darien, and other towns, were burned without the provocation of 
defence; and the "fifty thousand homes" ruthlessly destroyed 
by our troops, for which the Rebel raiders lately left a record 
of their vengeance on the walls of one of the few houses sacked 
by them in the District of Columbia, is hardly an exaggeration. 

When General Early warned his officers against imitation of 
the excesses of Hunter, Montgomery, and Higginson, on the 
invasion of the native States of many of them,* he may have 
hoped that the sentence he pronounced upon them, and the ex- 
ample which he set, might have called forth a response in the 
sentiment of the North — but, alas ! it was not so ; for the last 



* General Early is a Virginian, and, as a member of the Conven- 
tion of that State, zealously opposed the ordinance of secession. 
46 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



4T 



twelve menths have left on our military annals stains of at 
least equal barbarity. 

The burning of "Washington, in North Carolina; of Alexan- 
dria, in Louisiana; the useless bombardment of Charleston, in 
which, according to General Jones, not one soldier, or laborer, 
on any military or naval work, has even been wounded ; the raid 
of Kilpatrick ; the threatened destruction of Richmond, according 
to a programme not yet disproved; the horrible barbarities of 
Sherman's raid, and the still more recent devastations and bru- 
tality of Hunter in Western Virginia ; all may have convinced 
the Confederate government that there were no means of bringing 
our military authorities to understand the principles and prac- 
tice of civilized nations in war, but by retaliating upon our de- 
fenceless people something of the suffering systematically inflicted 
upon the South, hoping, in the words of a recent editorial of the 
National Intelligencer, "that those who were unable to realize 
the atrocities of such excesses, when committed by their own 
troops, would be able to perceive, clearly, their native heinous- 
ness in the light of their burning homes." 

A letter of General Jones to General Foster, which was not 
part of the correspondence given to the Northern press, proves 
that the bombardment of Charleston for the last year has effected 
no military object, and could, indeed, have had none. The 
burning of the city, or driving the terrified inhabitants into the 
unhealthy regions, where a night's residence is death, might 
have been the result; and, to use General Gilmore's phrase, 
"the heart of the rebellion might have been struck" in the blood 
and misery of old men, women, and children, who could only aid 
the cause with their prayers; but even in this only a limited 
success was attained. 

Greater achievements were boasted of in the great Yazoo 
Expedition. In one region, we are told, " that for thirty miles in 
length, and twelve in breadth, not a building of any kind but 
has been destroyed; and every thing which could sustain life," 
and our soldiers are said "to have grown exceedingly merry over 
the consternation of the women and children when they woke up 



48 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



in the night and found their houses in flames;" "it was such fun 
to see them running about in the woods in their night-clothes, 
frightened to death;" but our narrator adds: "The stake is too 
mighty to admit of any remissness — to allow even the voice of 
suffering women and children to hold us back. Hot tears may 
scald the cheeks of mothers, and hunger pinch thousands of 
needy ones, and yet, the success of the Union cause was worth 
all that sacrifice." 

All this was repeated in Georgia, under the same commander, 
within the last few months. There we find a more merciful wit- 
ness, who thus wrote in his report to the New York Herald: 
"It is sad to contemplate the fearful suffering of the people, par- 
ticularly the women and children in the parts of Georgia where 
we have campaigned. As to men, the young are in the rebel 
lines ; the old have fled to the woods. * * * * 
Our men have, in too many instances, burned down the houses, 
destroyed their contents, driving their wretched inmates, house- 
less, homeless, starving outcasts, to perish of cold and hunger. 
***** I have met frenzied groups of affrighted, 
starving women and children, huddled together in the woods, 
where many of them perish of cold and want. Such sad pictures 
of old and young, gray-haired matrons and timid girls, clinging 
together in hopeless misery, may be imagined, but cannot be 
described. I have seen whole columns of brave men melt away 
before the leaden storm of shot and shell; I have ridden among 
the dead and dying and wounded of many a battle-field ; I have 
heard the groans of fearful agony from the poor sufferers under 
the scalpel knife, where piles of legs and arms, the grim trophies 
of war, attested death's fearful carnage, yet I was not moved as 
I have been by the sight of these poor, helpless miserables. 
Alas ! alas ! for this cruel war of blood and tears. Is there 
Tartarus deep enough or hot enough for its authors?" 

Inspired by a spirit as mad as it was cruel, General Hunte 
the perpetrator of some of the worst atrocities in the South, w? 
this summer, placed in command of the army in Western Vir 
nia. He was soon driven from it, routed and disgraced, but i 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



49 



before his outrages on every unprotected home had brought 
infamy on himself, which, alas ! we must share with him. When 
the Confederate army advanced over the country he had 
desolated, a scene of misery presented itself which harrowed 
their souls, and made an appeal for vengeance which could not 
be resisted. General Early says: " I followed him about sixty 
miles, and language would fail me to describe the terrible desola- 
tion which marked his path. Dwelling-houses and other buildings 
were almost universally burned; fences, implements of hus- 
bandry, and everything available for the sustenance of human 
life, so far as he could do so, were everywhere destroyed. We 
found many, very many families of helpless women and children, 
who had been suddenly turned out of doors, and their houses and 
contents condemned to the flames; and, in some cases, where 
they had rescued some extra clothing, the soldiers had torn the 
garments into narrow strips and strewn them upon the ground 
for us to witness, when we arrived in pursuit." 

Private accounts confirm this tale, and there are among us 
witnesses of all of this and worse. One could hardly believe 
that soldiers of a Christian country could have done such things. 
I may, moreover, refer to several letters which have appeared in 
the newspapers, detailing the pitiless sacking and burning of the 
private residences of Governor Letcher, Mr. Miller's, in Campbell 
County, Mr. Boteler's, Mr. Lee's, Mr. Andrew Hunter's. For 
these acts indemnity was demanded in Pennsylvania — for these 
the terrible retaliation was inflicted on the town of Chambers- 
burg. 

My countrymen must remember that Northern armies first 
invaded the territories of the Southern States ; our soldiers first 
burned Southern cities, plundered and destroyed Southern homes. 
The people of the South, whether mistaken or not in their asser- 
tion of revolutionary rights, would have been less than men if 
they had not risen to repel their invaders ; would be almost more 
than men, if they did not regard the perpetrators of such acts, 
and those who justify them, with undiscriminating hate. 

Well may we ask, to what end can such a contest lead, con- 



50 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



ducted with such barbarity? Is it not our duty to seek for 
those who inaugurated it, and summon them for the condemna- 
tion of the world ? They are among us, and one high in the 
confidence of their allies presents the accusation. 

On the accession of Mr. Lincoln to the presidency, when the 
mad, if not criminal, act of secession, aroused the indignation of 
our people, the men whom the division of the great Democratic 
party for the first time placed in power, saw their advantage, and 
had the skill to profit by the outbreak of national enthusiasm in 
the cause of the Union. The necessities of a successful minority 
required a step towards war which should be irrevocable. Time 
was not given for reflection — every proposition to secure peace 
rejected. They hastened to the shedding of blood, that our 
maddened people might be willing to give everything for ven- 
geance and victory.* There is a current story — that when 
General Scott urged upon the President measures of concession 
and conciliation,- as sure to save the Union, he was answered to 
this effect : "If I should do as you advise, what will become of 
Abraham Lincoln ? — what will become of the Republican party ? " 
The same motives seemed to actuate him in many other depre- 
catory appeals to those who, at later periods of the war, coun- 
selled moderate measures : " He could not afford to lose the 
support of the extreme men of his party." 

He hesitated, for he could not but perceive the unconstitu- 
tionality and the mischievous consequences of the measures urged 
upon him ; but he always yielded what seemed to be his principles 
at last, till now " he stands abreast with the most advanced 
Radicalism," — to quote again the National Intelligencer. 

Yet he has not gained the confidence and support of those 
whom he courted by such terrible sacrifices. Those who will 
read the letter of Messrs. Wade and Winter Davis, may see in 



* I am well aware the same reproach has been made against some of 
the Southern politicians. The great majority of the people, and most 
of their leading statesmen, Gen. Davis among them, would gladly have 
accepted compromises. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



51 



what esteem he is held by them — what credit they give him for 
integrity. The charges urged in that remarkable manifesto 
might well be the basis for impeachment. This, however, is not 
the place to discuss them ; but in the reply to it in the New 
York Times — a paper understood to be the organ of the Presi- 
dent, and certainly the most eminent of his advocates — the edi- 
tor, Mr. Raymond, has ventured on a course of defence which 
expose, with the authority of unquestionable knowledge of facts, 
the plan and objects of the war, as adopted by the leaders of the 
Republican party, and not only acquiesced in by the Administra- 
tion, but carried out by the use of every means which the war 
power has placed in his hands. 

Speaking of the President's accusers the Times says : " His 
invasions of Congressional Rights, his usurpations of Executive 
Power, would not disturb them if they were practised in their 
behalf and for the furtherance of their schemes." 

For says Mr. Raymond: " No two men have been more 
clamorous for a vigorous prosecution of the war — none more in- 
tolerant of every one who faltered or hesitated in the crusade 
of hatred and extermination which they have ceaselessly pro- 
claimed. No measure has been too extreme, no policy too 
violent, no mode of warfare too savage for their tastes. They 
have led the van in the blind race of radicalism and barbarism, 
into which they have seduced many public men of wiser judg- 
ments and calmer passions than themselves. They have scouted 
the idea whenever it has been presented, in any form, of closing 
the war, until not only should slavery be abolished, but until 
the people of the Southern States should have been reduced to 
the condition of helpless and hopeless vassals of the central govern- 
ment." " They have sought steadily and consistently their con- 
quest and subjugation as States, in order that they might found 
upon them a new empire based upon their own ideas, and to be 
ruled by their counsels. They have sustained the war, not as a 
means of restoring the Union, but to free the slaves, seize the 
lands, crush the spirit, destroy the rights, and blot out forever the 
political freedom of the people inhabiting the Southern States." 



52 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR, 



These are memorable words — strange admissions. Congres- 
sional rights have then been invaded, executive powers have been 
usurped, a crusade of hatred and extermination has been pro- 
claimed ; men of wiser judgments and calmer passions have been 
seduced to follow in a blind race of radicalism and barbarism. 
Conquest, subjugation, extermination, to seize the lands, crush 
the spirit, destroy the rights, and blot out forever the political 
freedom of the people of the Southern States — were the objects 
of the war, according to the plan of its first and most powerful 
advocates. 

This can be no calumny, when the leading paper in the con- 
fidence of the present Administration asserts it. 



NOTE TO PAGE 38. 

One of my most valued friends has objected to the application of 
the term "incendiary" to the mission of Judge Hoare. I beg to be 
understood as giving that character to the mission, not to the envoy. 
I should indeed be loath to designate by an offensive epithet a gentle- 
man of the highest standing, against whose honor there has never been 
a reproach j who is, as Mr. Webster, in his speech on the compromise 
measures, designates him, " one of the most respectable men of the 
commonwealth, bearing an excellent character, of excellent temper,, 
and every way and every where entitled to the regard he has enjoyed 
among the people of Massachusetts;" but his mission was neverthe- 
less incendiary, as has been admitted to me by gentlemen of standing 
in Massachusetts, and as it was universally regarded in South Caro- 
lina. Even Mr. Webster, in the speech just quoted, said that " it was 
calculated rather to inflame feeling than to do good." And well it 
might, in a population but lately fearfully excited by the discovery of 
an extensive conspiracy among their slaves, organized and directed by 
a free black man. The object of the mission was to proclaim and insist 
on, in open court, the right of the native and domesticated negroes of 
Massachusetts to enjoy all the rights of citizenship in South Carolina,, 
including, as a consequence, the privilege of free intercourse with the 
slave population of the South. Now, the State of Massachusetts 
might give all civil and electoral privileges to any of her inhabitants,. 



THE CRUELTIES OF WAR. 



53 



but could not make them citizens of the Union. Nor, with the pen- 
alties then (or very recently) on her own statute books, against the 
immigration of and intermarriage with negroes, could she, without 
inconsistency, object to the exclusion from a sister State of a class of 
persons most likely to be the tools of the fanatical enemies of Southern 
institutions. 

The State of South Carolina asserted for herself the same right to 
exclude those whose presence she judged dangerous to her domestic 
peace, and to hold them in temporary confinement if they defied her 
laws, as she has to shut up in quarantine all coming by sea, from dis- 
tricts infected with plague or yellow fever. England, ever jealous of 
the rights of her subjects, yielded, though reluctantly, to these ordin- 
ances ) and if ordinary comity had influenced the Northern States of 
our confederacy, they might easily have taken care that their vessels, 
trading so profitably with the South, might not carry in their crews a 
cause of constant irritation and offence. The legislation of other 
States, (especially at the Northwest,) which was never disputed, seems 
to confirm the constitutionality of the statute of South Carolina. 

Many good men and learned lawyers thought differently. Judge 
Hoare was one of them. He was, I have reason to believe, treated at 
Charleston with personal kindness and respect • but he was not per- 
mitted to execute his mission, which, believing it, as I do, calculated, 
perhaps intended to offend, I must persist in calling " incendiary." 



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